Scott Hicks's Shine represents a unique milestone in popular filmmaking, as far as perceptions of classical music and the people who play it are concerned. Its impact on the public far transcended its considerable box office success, its multiple Academy Award nominations, and the Oscar-winning portrayal of pianist David Helfgott by Geoffrey Rush.

As a result of the film, Helfgott's recording of Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 3 (the "Rach 3"), which plays a key dramatic role in the movie, has become the best-selling classical release of 1997, and one of the best-selling classical recordings of all time. The concerto is now the best-selling of any of the composer's works--itself quite an achievement, considering the 80-year popularity of the composer's Second Piano Concerto, used in David Lean's Brief Encounter and Billy Wilder's The Seven-Year Itch. And sales of all of Rachmaninoff's music have reached their highest levels in decades, perhaps ever.

The mere fact that Hicks was able to keep music at the center of a film about personal tragedy and triumph makes Shine a special achievement. At one time, it was impossible even to propose movies that dealt with classical music. Louis Pasteur and Thomas Edison were considered appropriate subjects for Hollywood biographies in the 1930s, but when Paul Muni asked to do a movie about the life of Beethoven, studio chief Jack L. Warner replied, "Who wants to see a movie about a blind [sic] composer?"

The mid-1940s saw a group of films dealing with the fancied personal agonies of Clara and Robert Schumann (Song of Love, 1947), Chopin (A Song to Remember, 1945, with Merle Oberon as George Sand), and Rimsky-Korsakov (Song of Scheherazade, 1947). In dealing with performing artists, the movies had a special fixation on the neuroses that supposedly lurked near the talent. Films such as The Seventh Veil (1945) and Spectre of the Rose (1946) depicted performing artists as self-destructive, even suicidal personalities, surrounded by people who talked at length about art and life. These films helped perpetuate the idea that performing artists (especially pianists) are a hopelessly neurotic bunch.

Hicks's most remarkable feat, apart from dramatizing the life of a living person in so compelling a manner, was separating the music from the symptoms of Helfgott's psychological problems. The notion implicit in the story is that Helfgott's having something to say at the piano is not a manifestation of a psychological fla--the desire and ability to perform are a way through and past a psychological tragedy. Within the dramatic context of the movie, the music itself becomes a declaration of wellness.

Ironically, this mirrors part of Rachmaninoff's own life. He suffered a trauma at the outset of his career that crippled him as a composer for years, and he only overcame it with the help of hypnosis. The initial result was the Second Piano Concerto; the Piano Concerto No. 3 was one of several pieces that the composer regarded as so challenging to the listener that he published an edited version, which was the edition that he recorded. And the fact that this is relevant to anyone in 1997 outside of a music library is an indication of Shine's success in telling its story.

--Bruce Eder

Cast

Credits

About the Transfer

Index of Films Buy CLV | View Items | Checkout Ordering Information | Criterion | Home Vision